It turns out, updating a guidebook is just about as much work as writing it in the first place. The new edition is out now. It’s bigger, and while I won’t claim it’s better, it’s every bit as good as the last one—and, most importantly, it’s bang up to date.
Back when the first edition rolled out in 2018, a colleague told me: “Doesn’t matter how much proofreading you do—there’ll always be mistakes.” He wasn’t wrong. One map sent people off anticlockwise instead of clockwise. In Barra, I said to look for the ferry terminal on the right—it’s actually on the left. Not ideal, but nothing catastrophic.
Some things were just out of my hands. The legendary Brig o’Turk tearoom—running strong for over a century—closed just as the first edition hit the shelves. I took it out of the reprint… only for it to reopen under new management before the updated books even landed.
Just up the road from the cafe is - or rather was - the bicycle tree. A local lad left his bike leaning up against a tree when he went off to fight in WW1. When he never came home, they never moved his bike. Over the years the tree grew, slowly swallowing the bike until only the handlebars and forks were visible, several feet in the air. I put it in the book - only for Storm Eowyn to topple the tree just as I went to print. I caught that one just in time. In the new edition, I added a café in Comrie, only to spot it in the background of a YouTube video with a big “For Sale” sign hanging over the door. That’s the problem with print—roads stay the same, but everything around them keeps shifting. The routes themselves are still solid, so older editions will get you where you need to go. But for this version, meticulous mapper Helen Stirling has gone over everything again, making sure every new bypass and roundabout is accounted for.
Looking back, the very first print run was… enthusiastic. Overloaded with exclamation marks—I could probably have cut two pages just by deleting them. And somehow, I managed to spell “cleg” (the infamous horsefly) as “Clegg,” (the infamous politican), That survived four print runs before anyone mentioned it.
In this latest edition, the moment the new books arrived—two pallets dropped by the roadside on a damp January morning—I spotted issues. A missing “c” in Friockheim. One café so good, it made it in twice. Still, in publishing terms, that counts as a win.
Now comes a different kind of challenge: convincing Amazon that when someone searches for the book, it should show the new edition—not the old one. You’d think that’d be straightforward. And don’t get me started on Facebook. Some lowlife hacked my account, and I was kicked out before I even knew what had happened. Meanwhile, Facebook kept trying to bill me for ads I couldn’t even access.
All told, it took two years to write the original book—and the better part of eighteen months to bring it up to date. Now I just need to sell the boxes of books in order the get into the spare bedroom again.
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